But it’s not just celebrities who are making surrogacy fashionable. Recent figures from the Children and Family Court Advisory and Support Service (Cafcass) show that record numbers of UK babies are being born to surrogate parents - 167 last year, up from 47 in 2007. Like the Griffithses, many couples go to countries where, unlike in the UK, commercial surrogacy is legal. Data released earlier this month show that in the past three years over 1,000 hopeful couples have travelled to a total of 57 such countries.

Standing before an American court convicted of the most heinous of child sex crimes, the double lives of Australian citizen Mark J. Newton and his long-term boyfriend Peter Truong were laid bare.

‘‘Being a father was an honour and a privilege that amounted to the best six years of my life,’’ the American-born Newton, 42, told the court.

Moments later Newton was sentenced to 40 years in prison for sexually abusing the boy he and Truong, 36 from Queensland, had ‘‘adopted’’ after paying a Russian woman $8000 to be their surrogate in 2005.

Police believe the pair had adopted the boy ‘‘for the sole purpose of exploitation’’.

The abuse began just days after his birth and over six years the couple travelled the world, offering him up for sex with at least eight men, recording the abuse and uploading the footage to an international syndicate known as the Boy Lovers Network.

‘‘Personally .. I think this is probably the worst [paedophile] rings ... if not the worst ring I’ve ever heard of,’’ investigator Brian Bone of the US Postal Inspection Service told reporters outside the US federal court room in Indiana.

US District Judge Sarah Evans Barker said the pair deserved a harsher punishment but were tried at district court level to avoid subjecting a jury to the repulsive images that had been produced.

‘‘What can be said? What can be done to erase some of the horror of this?’’ Judge Barker said in handing down her sentence.

One video is said to show Newton performing a sex act on the boy when he was less than two weeks old.

Judge Barker said the pair brainwashed the child to believe the sexual abuse was normal.

Newton and Truong came to the attention of police in August 2011 after their connections to three men arrested over the possession of child exploitation material came to light. The couple had visited the three men in the US, New Zealand and Germany with their son.

While the couple were visiting family in the US, Queensland police searched their Cairns home and found enough evidence to alert their US counterparts who raided their Los Angeles base and took the boy into custody.

Newton and Truong claimed they were being targeted because they were homosexual. However after his arrest in February 2011, Truong gave investigators the password to the computer hard drives police had seized. It detailed the years of abuse.

PEDOPHILES are using inter­national surrogacy to “commission’’ babies for abuse, Federal Circuit Court Chief Judge John Pascoe has revealed.

Likening surrogacy to the sex trade, he warns that Australians who pay surrogate mothers overseas can never be sure they were not exploited.

“Although these women may appear to be voluntarily offering their service to unsuspecting ­Australian commissioning couples, the reality can be quite different,’’ Chief Judge Pascoe states in ­advice to the Family Law Council.

“It is therefore of little weight when commissioning couples ­assert ‘our surrogate wasn’t ­exploited’, as the reality is that in the absence of any regulatory scheme they cannot be sure.

“As is the case with human trafficking for the sex industry, traffickers looking for potential surrogate mothers prey on rural women who they compel to move to major cities to be exploited.’’

Judge Pascoe and Family Court Chief Justice Diana Bryant challenged state governments either to prosecute parents who breached the ban on commercial surrogacy, or to make it legal.

“In our view, if governments do not want to enforce these laws, they should be repealed,’’ the judges say in a joint statement.

“Courts being asked to make parenting orders are placed in a difficult position where there is clear illegality by the Australian ‘parents’ but there is uncertainty about whether action will be taken by the relevant authorities.’’

The judges repeat their call — revealed in The Australian on Thursday — for governments to legalise and regulate commercial surrogacy in Australia.

“We understand the powerful desire to become a parent, but it ought not be at the expense of the welfare of the child or surrogate mother,’’ they state.

“Regulation (in Australia) could provide fairness in contractual arrangements, proper provision of health cover for the surrogate mother, and a rigorous eligibility criterion with the ­appropriate checks and balances for contracting parents.’’

The judges warn that the case of baby Gammy — a Down syndrome baby abandoned with his surrogate mother in Thailand after his West Australian parents took his healthy twin sister home — was “not an isolated one’’.

Altruistic surrogacy is legal throughout Australia but commercial surrogacy is banned everywhere except in the Northern Territory, which has no surrogacy laws. In Queensland, couples risk three years’ jail for paying a surrogate more than her medical costs. The penalty is two years’ jail in NSW, Western Australia and Victoria, and one year in South Australia and the ACT, while Tasmania imposes a $13,000 fine. No one has been prosecuted.

In his submission to the Family Law Council’s review of surrogacy laws, Chief Judge Pascoe criticises the “not in my backyard’’ attitude of legislators.

“It would appear that governments in Australia are already ­giving tacit consent to commercialised arrangements in their ­refusal to enforce the law against those who openly flaunt it,’’ his submission states. “Ignoring the problem does nothing to assist the vulnerable women and children outside of Australia.’’

The Chief Judge warns that lack of regulation in many countries “creates a risk that children could be ‘commissioned’ specifically for trafficking or abuse purposes’’.

“Tragically this is a risk that has too often been realised,’’ he says.

Chief Judge Pascoe quotes from a UNICEF report that ­suggests that one in four inter-country adoptions in Germany has a “commercial or criminal background, some of which have links to facilitating pedophilia’’.

Chief Judge Pascoe says Australian parents might be unaware a surrogate mother has been ­exploited or abused. “It is not uncommon for many commissioning parents to never meet the birth mother,’’ he says.